QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS

Welcome to our blog.

This blog is being written as a diary of our “round North America” tour.  This tour will take us across Canada and the United States over the next nine months following the compass west to east, north to south, east to west and then homeward.  We will be travelling with our boys, Charlie and Bailey in our 2006 Beaver 40 foot motorhome with a towed 2010 Ford Ranger pickup. 

On June 15^th we left our RV park at Sunshine Valley near Hope on the first leg of our tour to visit Crystal, Curby and family on Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands).  This day coincided with Susan’s last day of work with Fraser Health.  Susan will officially retire on July 14th.  We headed up the Fraser Canyon in the bright sunshine and into the small Caribou community of Clinton.  We left the next day for Prince George, spent two days there and then drove on to Prince Rupert.  On June 19 we boarded the BC ferry en-route to Haida Gwaii and enjoyed a virtually flat ocean.  Six hours later we arrived in Skidegate and headed up to Queen Charlotte.

Here Skyla and Daysen pose with the menagerie of pets in the house at the time of our visit including our two boys, Bailey with Skyla and Charlie in front of Daysen.  Over the next week we enjoyed travelling around our old stomping grounds, visiting some friends in the coffee shops and walking around the town.  We attended Daysen and Skyla’s school wind-up party on the beach and had a great time with the kids.   We also had the chance to head down into Gwaii Haanas National Marine Conservation Area Reserve to the ancient village of Skedans.  Crystal’s friend, Mandy, took Crystal and us down on her boat where we had a personal tour of the old village together with a close up view of all the relics and artifacts of the village.  After the tour, we travelled around Louise Island, found some very large ancient spruce trees and raced through the narrows between Louise Island and Morseby Island.   The whole trip took the better part of a day and was so unbelievably beautiful.

Here Crystal, Susan and I are standing in front of a Potlatch pole.  Each of the rings, which are about a meter (3 feet) from each other, denotes the number of potlatches sponsored by the Chief or his family.  This pole stretches out almost 40 feet.

We had a lot of fun with the local Sitka deer.

When fully mature they are no bigger than a large dog, are quite tame and can be quite mischievous.

Here Crystal and Mandy are standing in front of one of the massive spruce trees Mandy's uncle, George Wesley had found.  We also had a chance to visit Mosquito Lake.  The World War II Mosquito bomber as so named because all of the spruce used to build the bombers came from the forest around Mosquito Lake.

A final look at the Islands as we headed back to Prince Rupert on the 27^th.   We arrived back in Bridal Falls on the 29^th for a week of taking care of the little things before we headed including a great dinner with Heather and Trevor and families to celebrate the June/July birthdays.  We left Bridal Falls on Wednesday, the 6^th of July and headed up to Kelowna to visit our good friends, Bob and Kim Gostlin and to have our new satellite dish mounted on our motorhome.  We left there on the 8^th and crossed into the United States.  Coming through Washington State was indeed a treat as we had the chance to see country we had not been through before including an amazing display of wind energy.  We passed through an area where hundreds of windmills were erected across all of the peaks. 

Our final destination for this leg was heading off to the Good Sam Rally to be held at Redmond, Oregon. This promises to be an exciting week for us as we are volunteering at the Rally as well as looking forward to seeing the exhibits and enjoying the concerts.  There will be 700+ new RVs on display, over 250+ vendors and exhibitors, 150+ seminars and we have a different concert every night, with Country music recording star Vince Gill on Saturday, 1960’s Herman’s Hermits from England on Thursday staring Peter Noone and Bobby Vinton on Friday night.